In the past few posts we’ve mentioned the new profile that we’re shipping in our upcoming release, but today’s the day that we give you the full scoop!

Profiles will be the center of Windows Live

Your profile will be the place for people to see what is going on with you, to communicate with you, and to see the content you are sharing. It’s also your way to express yourself. You can choose from a variety of themes, share what you’re doing online (both on Windows Live and on other websites) in your what’s new feed, and get to all of of the things you’ve posted on Windows Live – your photos, files, space, and profile details. If you want to add someone to your network or communicate with them, either through private messages or by posting a note for everyone to see, the profile will be the best place to do it.

Your profile will use the existing information you’ve filled out for your space’s profile – there’s no need to re-enter anything. So if you’ve already added a profile picture, interests, a self description, or any other profile information it will still be there.

Let’s talk about the different parts of your profile:

• The top of the profile will highlight your theme, profile picture, name, status message, occupation, and location. Many of the new Windows Live themes (like the one shown below) will be dynamic, reflecting the time of the day and the weather in your current location. You can see that it’s kind of cloudy and gloomy in Seattle right now, but it’s not raining!
  
• In the left hand column there will be links to the content that you’ve shared, including photos, files, and your space.
• Beneath that will be the profile details you’ve shared, including your self-summary, interests, birthday, and contact information. Don’t worry, you decide who gets to see this information. In fact, you decide who has permission to see your stuff in Windows Live, from photos, to your space, to your favorite music.
• Under the profile details will be the list of web activities you’ve added to your profile. If you use another website, like Flickr, Pandora, or Twitter, you can add it to your Windows Live profile. Every time you make an update on one of those other sites it’ll show up in your what’s new feed. It’s a great way to share all of the things you do online in one place.
  
• Speaking of what’s new, your recent activity will be front and center on the profile page. Your friends can quickly catch up on what you’ve been up to, and all you need to do is just keep doing the things you normally do online. You can see below that Joe has added a favorite book, uploaded a Word document, shared some photos, and left some comments on photos and blog posts in the past few weeks:
  
• The profile will be a great place to get in touch and communicate with people. You’ll be able to send an e-mail or private message from a persons profile, or post a note on their profile if you want your friends to see what you’ve said:
  
• At the top of the right-hand column of your profile there will be a list of the people in that your network. When someone visits your profile they’ll see a list of the people you both know:
  
• Finally, there will be a special section where you can show the world, or just your friends, the books, music, and movies you really care about, called favorite things:
  

We’re really excited about the new profile, as well as the rest of Windows Live, and we can’t wait to release it to the world. Let us know what you think in the comments.

- The Windows Live team

One of our favorite features in the current version of Spaces is the What’s New feed on the Spaces home page. It’s a great way for you to keep up to date on what’s happening with all of your friends on Windows Live, and in our upcoming release we’re making it even better!

Include updates from non-Windows Live sites in your What’s New activity:

The biggest news is the addition of Web Activities to What’s New. What’s New has always done a good job keeping you up to date on what your friends are up to in Windows Live, but what about the things they do on other sites like Flickr, Yelp, or Twitter? With the new release you will be able to add Web Activities to your profile for 3rd party sites and the things that you share on those sites will show up in your friends’ What’s New. For example, if you use Twitter you can add the Twitter web activity to Windows Live, and then every time you send a tweet it will be automatically included in your recent activity and your friends’ What’s New feeds.

We’re shipping with support for over a dozen Web Activities in our upcoming release, but we’ll be adding even more as time goes on.

Windows Live activities:

Web Activities aren’t the only new and cool things in What’s New though. Here are some of the other exciting changes we’re making:

• Beautiful new way for showing photo updates
  
• Profile picture and status message updates:
  
• Comments made by your friends on blogs, guestbooks, photos, files, and favorite websites are now included in What’s new:
  
• Favorite websites shared by your friends show up in your What’s New:
  
• Files added to SkyDrive now include an image for the specific file type uploaded as well as the file name:
  
• List and Favorite Things updates now include the pictures of your favorite books, movies, or music in them:
  

Viewing What’s New throughout Windows Live

The primary place for viewing your What’s New feed in the next release is the Windows Live home page, which functionally replaces the Spaces home page:

The new Windows Live home page will have all sorts of awesome features, like giving you access to your e-mail and calendar, letting you add your favorite photos to the top of the page, showing you your beautiful Windows Live theme, and, of course, showing you What’s New with the people in your Windows Live network.

You will also be able to see What’s New with an individual friend by visiting their profile page:

Throughout Windows Live we will surface What’s New information in lots of appropriate places:

• The new Spaces landing page will highlight blog activity in Spaces and on 3^rd party blog sites
• In Messenger you’ll see What’s New updates scroll across the bottom of the main window
• On the Hotmail Today page we’ll show you What’s New from your favorite contacts
• After you send an e-mail to someone in Hotmail we’ll show you What’s New for them
• When you go to an individual Group or Event you’ll be able to see all of the new activity in that group right from the main page for that Group or Event
• We’ll also have a home page for all of your Groups (and another for your Events) that will give you an overview of all the new activity in your Groups (or Events)
• The landing page for photos will show you your friends’ recent photo updates in Windows Live and other photos web sites like Flickr and Photobucket 

We’ll be continuing to talk about the upcoming release of Windows Live next week. Please let us know what you think in the comments.

- The Windows Live team

As promised last week, we’re going to talk in more detail about the exciting changes coming to Windows Live, and we figured we should start with the product you’re using right now, Windows Live Spaces.

More freedom to do what you want

Let’s start off with the most visible change: we’re removing the horizontal ad from your space!

Your space is all about your content, the way you want to show it, so we’re reducing the amount of clutter and giving you more freedom by:

• Removing the horizontal ad from the top of your space
• Making all of the modules optional (even the Title and Tagline module, which previously couldn’t be removed)
• Using a simpler header that has less text than other pages in Windows Live
• Letting you change themes, fonts, colors, and background images on your space using the customize menu
• Letting you rename or not show the title of each module on your space by using the settings menu for each module in customize mode
• Letting you select exactly which photo albums to show in your photos module – you can even customize what parts of the photos interface to display

(These last three are features that we’ve already implemented and are available today in Spaces)

Better looking pages

We’re also making some additional small changes to make your space look even better. One of the things we’ve done is to improve the typography on your space by using a larger, more readable default font, Segoe UI. It’s a subtle change, but it really helps make your content easier to read. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of our post from last week with the current font and with the new default font:

(Current version on left, new version on right)

We’re also doing a better job of differentiating titles from normal text by using different size text instead of relying on bold versus plain text. Of course, if you prefer the old font you can customize your space to use the old font (when we release the new update, we won’t override any font selections you’ve already made).

There’ll also be a couple of theme changes, mainly to the header and background images, that make things look a bit simpler, cleaner, and more attractive. The most obvious of these is that we’re getting rid of the 3D “bevel” in the header and moving to solid colors or unobstructed background images. You can see this in the comparison screenshot below:

(Current version on top, new version on bottom)

Don’t worry, these theme changes won’t break your layout or change the way your modules look – they’ll only affect the header and background images.

Improved blogging experience (especially with photos)

Blogging with photos will get even better with the next update. About a year ago we fixed the Add Photos button in blogs on Internet Explorer so your photos were inserted inline in your blog entry, which let you move them around, place them exactly where you wanted, and generally make your blog entries more attractive and appealing. With this release all browsers will be able to insert images inline, and you won’t need to install our upload tool in order to insert images. If you do install the tool, however, you’ll get a rich, drag and drop upload experience that makes inserting images from your computer, or from a photo album you already have on Windows Live, a snap.

We also built a great new photo preview that you’ll see when you click on a photo in a blog entry. Instead of opening up a new window with a larger version of the image, the current page will show a beautiful preview of the original size image (or as much as can fit on your screen):

In the coming days we’ll continue to blog about all of the cool stuff in the next release. We hope you’re as excited about it as we are. As always, please let us know what you think in the comments.

- The Windows Live team

Some folks are going to ask this question when they read about or see the small tweaks we’ve made to the formatting of Spaces. The new font we’re using throughout Windows Live helps make your content more readable and better looking, but if you want to use the old font, or even a completely different font, you can do so in Spaces by following these steps:

• Sign in and go to your space
• Click on the “Customize” menu in the upper right hand corner, and choose “Advanced”
• When the “Advanced” menu pops up go “Text colors and fonts” section and choose “Verdana” for the font
• Go to the “Module colors and fonts” section and choose “Verdana” for the title font
• Click the “Close tab” button and then the “Save” button

Have you already changed which font you are using on your space? If so you don’t need to follow the steps above because your font selection won’t change if you’ve already changed the font on your space.

If you want to keep the current, smaller text size when we release the next version of Spaces you can change the text size to “Small” in the same “Advanced” part of the customize experience described above.

- The Windows Live team